Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: charismatic phrase of my education. Poetry and wisdom. The only thing I got out of college and it cost Dad three thousand dollars a word. Beautiful words and not even in Bartlett’s. Suits me fine. Going back, taking the immigrant’s route, seeking my fortune in the New World. Mad Marguerite, the end-product, recapitulating the experiences and history of my ancestors.

Going back to start again: like birds, lemmings, salmon—whatever fights wind and tides and countercurrents to follow instinct to the source. The urge of ineluctable necessity. My choice was always made.

I have cast auspices with V. and I dig the message: Do not force things, but be receptive to what comes. I should have done it years ago. I’m always late. “Late, late—my word I’m late,” cried the white rabbit. . . . “Off with her head,” said the Duchess. . . .

Hard to sleep the night before leaving; at dawn I wake to find myself curled in the fetal, defensive position. Hating life and the complexities of it, the hurting of people, the compulsive goddam need to be oneself—to chase the fucking ego all over the external world because it eludes us inside and we cannot find it there and be satisfied.

Darkness at dawn, and vague regrets. Sad, unsure, wavering. Hearing Alberto in the studio as he folds the grating hardware of his cot back to divan; the garbage truck in the courtyard, the fountain in the garden, and then, finally, the chime of the Quirinal clock sounding the hour: seven o’clock, rise and shine!

Everything’s immediately better. Get breakfast, kiss Weezy and send her off to school, talk, move, act, dress. Affront a new day. Action.

Alberto at the airport: “At least if I knew you were going off with someone you loved,” he says. His face is drawn and sad but composed. He is not emotional. “But you have no one. At least if I knew you could communicate with someone else, but in all your life who have you had except me? You’ve never opened completely, but the little you did was with me.”

“But I’ve known what love is—I knew it before being with you.”

“That idiot Verdile! He’s done nothing for you if he’s let you go on living in the past.”

“It’s not the past I’m concerned with, it’s the future.”

“The same mistake,” says Alberto.

Fuchsia trees blooming near Keats’s grave as he drives me past the Protestant Cemetery and Pyramid of Gaius Cestius. To the airport, en route to America. Addio, Rome. Good-bye, Alberto.